The statistics of string/M theory vacua

By Michael R Douglas. 2003

639 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss systematic approaches to the classification of string/M theory vacua, and physical questions this might help us resolve. To this end, we initiate the study of ensembles of effective Lagrangians, which can be used to precisely study the predictive power of string theory, and in simple examples can lead to universality results. Using these ideas, we outline an approach to estimating the number of vacua of string/M theory which can realize the Standard Model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26142d4b415f7ca3b855ccfba78d86f952e833da

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Citations in the corpus

Sinks in the landscape, Boltzmann brains and the cosmological constant problem (2006, background): “P 01(2007)022 Keywords: string theory and cosmology, inflation ArXiv ePrint: hep-th/0611043 * To the memory of Eugene Feinberg, who was trying to make a bridge between science, philosophy and art. c©2007 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA 1475-7516/07/01022+39$30.00 JC A P 01(2007)022 Contents”
Categorizing Different Approaches to the Cosmological Constant Problem (2004, background): “tressed that this approach to the cosmological constant problem is especially used within string theory, where one has stumbled upon a wide variety of possible vacuum states, rather than a unique one [213, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 255, 256]. By taking diﬀerent combinations of extra-dimensional geome”
Compactifications of heterotic strings on non-Kähler complex manifolds II (2003, background): “Note Added II: In recent times there have appeared several articles on the net [30],[31] and [32], claiming that since fluxes satisfy the Dirac quantization condition, there is still an infinite number of string vacua, labeled by a discrete integer.”
The effective action of type II Calabi‐Yau orientifolds (2004, background): “bilized moduli ﬁelds. Assuming that this can be achieved, for example by background ﬂuxes, one encounters a huge set of possible vacua labeled by diﬀerent ﬂux quantum numbers. In the pioneering paper [138] it was argued that a statistical analysis of this ‘landscape’ could lead a deeper understandin”
Four-dimensional string compactifications with D-branes, orientifolds and fluxes (2006, background): “Douglas proposed that, complementary to a model by model search, one should follow a statistical approach to the string vacuum problem [547], as this large degeneracy seemed to make it very unlikely that we will easily identify models, which come close to our universe.”
Flux compactifications in string theory: A Comprehensive review (2005, background): “Since all possible vacua are too many (mat be even infinite) Douglas and collaborators [204, 30, 31, 205] have advocated for a statistical study of the “landscape” of vacua, which could give some guidance principle for the search of the right vacuum.”
SUPERCONFORMAL FIELD THEORIES (2005, neutral): “(8)The number of elements in the chiral ring of flat space has been counted in [25].”
Inflationary Cosmology after Planck 2013 (2014, methodology): “In particular, using the popular estimate M∼ 10(500) [66], one finds the total number of the potentially observable outcomes can be as large as 10(10) 375 .”
Systematics of moduli stabilisation in Calabi-Yau flux compactifications (2005, background): “We also note that as the solutions described above are not tachyonic, the increase in tachyons found near the conifold locus by Denef and Douglas [ 10 ]”